The World Map According to Market Capitalization

There's good stuff at MarketWatch on how the world would look like if countries were re-sized according to their total stock market capitalization. As with most things, though, there are measurement issues involved with the presentation above. China's A-shares or those which cannot be owned by foreigners are not included, making the mainland appear far smaller than its actual market capitalization if these local-only shares were to be considered as well:

Bank of America Merrill Lynch this month published a report transforming many of their investment themes into maps. One of note is what the world would look like if sized by market capitalization. The
U.S. is still looking like the U.S. — and Japan is pretty hefty — but
where did China go? And how is Hong Kong bigger than the mainland?

Some
readers have noted that China looks unusually small — that’s because
the methodology here is to use MSCI’s numbers. The index provider still keeps out the so-called A-shares from inclusion in
its indexes, for reasons including capital mobility. Were the A-shares
included, even after the rout in that country, the market cap of China
would swell by tenfold...

The U.S. market
capitalization is $19.8 trillion, or 52% of world market cap, which the
brokerage says is the highest since the 1980s.

In financial markets at least, the United States remains the preponderant power. It's something to think about in the year 2015.